Underpowered star vehicle that swerves into every lamp post going
Night School
12A cert, 111 min Dir Malcolm D Lee Starring Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish, Ron Riggle, Romany Malco, Anne Winters, Keith David, Taran Killam, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Ben Schwartz
Tiffany Haddish looks as if she could eat Kevin Hart for breakfast. In Night School, a sloppy vehicle for them both, you frequently wish she would. The closest her character comes to in this is battering Hart’s Teddy to hell and back in a boxing ring, as part of a wacko educational programme, which insists that his dyslexia, dyscalculia and concentration issues could all be solved if he could just snap out of his general jackass ways.
The movie keeps insisting that Hart’s character, a high school dropout who just lost his job as a barbecue store’s top employee, isn’t dumb, even though it loves to watch him do dumb stuff such as blow up his workplace by accident. Let’s just say he has a lot to learn.
It looks like a romcom but isn’t one – Haddish’s Carrie, who ends up teaching him in adult remedial lessons, is gay, though she’s relatively slow to clear this up, having no love life to speak of. In the absence of any romantic chemistry, it’s hard to say what the two stars are really doing here, other than making a series of goofy faces at one another and begging the supporting cast to liven things up – and here too they’re out of luck.
Night School wants to be something like The Breakfast Club for middle-aged losers, but there are too many classmates for any functional poignancy to develop, and everyone gets a maximum of two comic notes apiece to play. As for Hart, he can’t rescue Teddy from being a fairly nightmarish character to watch, so doesn’t waste too much effort on that, throwing himself into hit-and-miss improv to see what sticks.
The movie fritters away its time with a plethora of characters, including Taran Killam’s baseball-bat wielding school principal, who isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks he is, and Megalyn Echikunwoke as Teddy’s super-hot fiancée, who the film basically puts on ice, then re-heats at the end to congratulate itself.
An obsession with emasculation and male pride paints the film into a backward corner, besides not exactly playing out as one of the zingiest comic set-ups of our time. Director Malcolm D Lee, coming off his biggest hit with Girls Trip, made a star out of Haddish in that one – or rather, she made a star out of herself, thank you very much, and gave him that hit. He owes her a vehicle of her own rather than this stint in a passenger seat, effectively doing her nails while the ever eager, rarely surprising Hart swerves his sports car into every lamp post going.